Knowing that Firefox 52 ESR will be no longer supported in June 2018, I decided to check out Firefox 57 Quantum.

I know Debian 9 won't have the next ESR release since it'll be version 59 and like with version 57, it uses Rust.

I downloaded the Firefox tarball and extracted to firefox-bin folder in my home directory and double clicked on "firefox" and it launched with no issues. It even had my configuration and was already connected with Firefox Sync that was setup in Firefox 52.

I figured Quantum wouldn't run since I don't have Rust runtime files or perhaps a better term - virtual machine - like how Java works.

I tried reading up on Rust but still am not sure - is Rust like Java where a user needs to install Java to run programs compiled to Java bytecode to be run by the JVM? Or does Rust compile to an executable to machine code?

Another question I have - am I ok with running Quantum this way as described above? I don't think I'm going towards running a FrankenDebian.

debiantu wrote:I tried reading up on Rust but still am not sure - is Rust like Java where a user needs to install Java to run programs compiled to Java bytecode to be run by the JVM? Or does Rust compile to an executable to machine code?

AFAIK rust is just needed to compile the source code.

debiantu wrote:Another question I have - am I ok with running Quantum this way as described above? I don't think I'm going towards running a FrankenDebian.

There should be no problems extracting and running Firefox in your own home folder, as it should not require root permissions to update.

It is great that you have done some homework about not borking your Debian system. You should read up about Debian's package management and installing foreign software so you can get comfortable and become more confident. The general rule of thumb is; if you are unsure, stick to the official repos. Or install a distro that officially supports later releases of Firefox.

Jessie and Stretch backports of Firefox release and beta are gone because of the requirement of rust to build them, which is not available in Jessie or Stretch. Please update your apt sources to use Firefox ESR instead.

So Debian is going to ditch firefox as of next year, instead of utilizing rust?

(not that it's a HUGE loss, the new firefox is googlized garbage & webextensions are dumb and break some decent add-ons that will never be ported)

waterfox is a suitable alternative, but what's to come of the extensions once mozilla ditches the legacy add ons entirely? i'm skeptical mozilla will keep the database open so waterfox users can continue to use them.

waterfox doesn't currently auto-update, either; so with each new release it has to be recompiled, or has that been fixed? (i can't find any updates stating one way or the other)and based on some older release notes:

Note: If you are using Linux, you will need version 3.4.22 of libstdc++.

it's still going to be a bit of work using this, as its not currently in the debian repositories.

debiantu wrote:I tried reading up on Rust but still am not sure - is Rust like Java where a user needs to install Java to run programs compiled to Java bytecode to be run by the JVM? Or does Rust compile to an executable to machine code?

rust if a programming language if you're familiar with the programming langauge C++ that is what mozilla currently uses to writefirefox codehttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Fir ... _Rust_coderun a search of firefox rustormozilla rustand you should find enough reading for at least a few days.

debiantu wrote:Knowing that Firefox 52 ESR will be no longer supported in June 2018, I decided to check out Firefox 57 Quantum.I know Debian 9 won't have the next ESR release since it'll be version 59 and like with version 57, it uses Rust.

As @fmp also asked: Does anyone know which browser will be Debian's default? Or what would be a likely choice? Waterfox?